about how letting the Bush tax cuts for the middle class expire would be sure death for Obama, Mitt comes up with that! A 1000 dollar increase on people making 20k a year. Should be and retesting debate, to say the least.

I want to close this out in the new chain. I thought about and read your comments and here is my bottom line take and an attempt to explain:

I do not intend to be provoke for the sake of provoking, but I see little reason to add to echo chambers. I comment on assertions I disagree with. Because a rarely post long comments about my complete agreement with someone, people mistake my comments for trolling.

I view claims that only the ignorant can support Obama or believe that he's been a success to be every bit as provocative as anything I have ever said to anyone here. I mean, it's calling me an idiot, right? The issue is that people don't see that as provocative because the majority agrees with it. It just seems like "straight talk" or whatever. It's offensive as hell to me and it happens constantly.

There should be a base assumption on a lefty blog that if you believe Obama and the dems are doing a great job or you believe that they are doing a horrible job, you can hold those opinions and not be deemed ignorant or unable to process facts or what have you. I am more than willing to give everyone here that respect. But I see no reason to give it if I am not giving it.

3. I think that BTD hit upon something very real the other day when he pointed to the change in Obama since August. I have been waiting for someone else to make the point and he opened the door. I think that there is demonstrable evidence that Obama has behaved as a liberal would want him to on a host of issues over the past 6 months. Not on everything. I am sure that someone will point to the detention law or their other pet "most evil Obama act ever" but there has been a marked change. This week was especially relevant because Obama slammed through recess appointments and earned almost universal praise from the left and particularly the blogosphere.

And yet here, it was as if we were talking about the same Obama that agreed to the tax deal at the end of 2010. The lack of any change in analysis shows that the analysis isn't motivated by facts. The facts have changed. Obama and the dems are, for the most part, doing the things that we have asked them to do. The unemployment picture is looking better. The economy is looking better. The foreign policy is looking better.

Frankly, it is all looking better.

And yet Anne and others are speaking as if nothing has changed.

I don't think it is out of line to suggest that perhaps Obama lost the ability to prove anything to these people a long time ago. That's really what my points here have devolved into: a failed attempt to get people to see that their attitudes have become every bit as un-objective and one sided as the worst obamabot.

I think an objective reader of these comments over the last month who had no side in the issue would agree with me.

That's pretty much it.

But I am always going to be me. I will give the respect I get back and will start my next completely issue focused comment in the same way that I did the last one: with a focus on the issue and not attacking those who disagree personally.

last night, about the many facets of the unemployment numbers, In fact they usually discuss Obama's performance very objectively, pros and cons, in a civilized way, with no one acting like the other side is stupid or acting in bad faith. Cenk can get riled up about Obama for the same reasons Anne does and I do, and still praise, sometimes a little bit sarcastically, the slow progress being made. And the other people on the show sometimes agree with him, or sometimes temper his exasperation.

Not sure where I was going with that...I just wish our arguments shed more light than heat, as theirs do on TYT.

"bipartisanship?" Is that where, instead of believing in and defining the best positions and policies and moving the doubters over to also supporting those positions - we call that "leading" - one strives instead for the glory of being all things to all people - which is a much more selfish goal than one that is focused on formulating the best policy for the greatest number of people?

In Obama's defense, he was cast as a liberal less by anything he said, or anything in his record, than by people who so wanted him to be a liberal that they projected that onto him.

Those who were not caught up in the optics, and the media's fawning and masturbatory coverage, knew from the get-go that Obama was no liberal, but we probably were not prepared for just how not-liberal he would prove to be, or how little pressure the Democratic Congress would exert or how little effort they would expend to move him leftward.

As Donald said so well, it means little to me that Obama is sounding like more of a populist, because his populist rhetoric from 2008 has not translated to action consistent with that rhetoric; I have no reason to trust him, ABG, not when he has demonstrated an affinity for, and wholly embraced, some of the most reprehensible and inhumane policies of the Bush administration.

My focus isn't on what a swell person Obama is - I don't know him now, and I won't ever know him - but about what he does, what he leads others to do; so far, and as much as you recoil from hearing this, he has governed as a conservative, and that's not who I am, not what I believe is the best way to govern, not likely to move the country where it needs to go. He's essentially going the same place the GOP is, just at a different speed.

We can choose to just go along and accept whatever is placed in front of us as the only choice on the menu, or we can stand up for ourselves, and stand up for what we believe, and refuse to be herded like the sheep they want us to be.

Geithner was the heir to Summers/Rubin. He was a follow-on to the Clinton financial people. In the late 90s, Bob Rubin and Larry Summers were hailed as great for the economy.

So, it was on its face not so outrageous to bring in the Clinton people......

Would someone have been better? Maybe so.....but Clinton basically ditched Robert Reich, Secretatry of Labor, ignoring him in favor of the Bob Rubin folks....

The chronic, systemic unfairness that the middle and lower income folks suffer will take a long time to cure, and will require a better economy before people will feel like devoting the resources and attention to solving that problem.

seemed to me to be an attempt to use the Clinton association as sort of a passport to acceptance, counting on invoking the nostalgia of better times to ease the way. Problem was that it seemed he didn't count on people looking past that link to see exactly what influence those particular Clinton alums had, what their overall philosophy was - and it was that, of course, that told the tale about where Obama was going, and where on the ideological spectrum he was likely to govern from.

This but-these-people-worked-for-Bill-Clinton response to skepticism and doubt was used everywhere to attempt to placate and soothe - even in the last year or so, we could count on ABG using the Clinton association as a cudgel to beat back criticism of Obama's economic decisions - you know he did!

So, for many of us, drawing on the Clinton alums sent a message that (1) there would be no creative, imaginative, transformative approach to fixing the country's economic ills, (2) the solutions would come from people wearing blinders where Wall Street was concerned - not exactly comforting, given that this is largely where the problems originated, (3) since a significant measure of deregulation occurred during the Clinton years and was advocated for by this bunch, the chances were that reregulation and holding the banksters and Wall Street accountable was probably not in the cards and (4) maybe Obama did actually think we were that stupid that we weren't going to make these connections.

There was an opportunity for a leader with the kind of vision Obama seemed to lay claim to during the campaign to do something other than reach back into the past to people who contributed to our eventual economic woes; that he chose to squander that opportunity spoke volumes - about his vision and his leadership and his comfort zone.

Mr. Favreau, the campaign's 26-year-old head speechwriter, found himself in the hotel lounge with less than three hours to revise what was to have been a victory speech. What made it particularly strange was that his words were being challenged. Mrs. Clinton had helped turn her campaign around by discounting Mr. Obama's elegant oratory, saying, "You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose."

"To be honest," Mr. Favreau said, "the first time I really stopped to think about how it felt was when he started giving the speech. I looked around at the senior staff, and they were all smiling. And I looked around the room and thought, `This is going to be O.K.' "

Mr. Favreau, or Favs, as everyone calls him, looks every bit his age, with a baby face and closely shorn stubble. And he leads a team of two other young speechwriters: 26-year-old Adam Frankel, who worked with John F. Kennedy's adviser and speechwriter Theodore C. Sorensen on his memoirs, and Ben Rhodes, who, at 30, calls himself the "elder statesman" of the group and who helped write the Iraq Study Group report as an assistant to Lee H. Hamilton.

So were some clothes still in my closet, but I don't find use for them now, either.

And what worked for automakers then wasn't working in a different economy, either. Or realtors or many others.

The smart ones said, well, just because that worked in the last century . . . 2009 was a far different time. The smart ones -- the smart president, too -- select their staffers with their own times in mind, and the very thought that what worked in the '90s would work in this recession just doesn't fly for anyone who paid attention even in Econ 101.

(But then, we still haven't seen transcripts, so to be fair, we don't know if he ever even took Econ 101.)

both in the numbers and in the direction. Beyond sustaining and gaining jobs, there is also, the qualitative dimension to employment--low wage jobs and no benefits, for vacancies and replacements, contributing to, and accelerating, the decades -long erosion of the middle class, so that our workers can be "competitive" with places like China or Bangladesh.

Several months ago, after listening to some economists & political analysts I respect, I felt I had the answer to, "what do they want?" The 1%, that is.

And, I wrote here that, "what they want," is to engineer a permanent reduction in the standard of living of around 30% for the remaining 99% . And, they hired (or captured) our government, courts, and media to accomplish just that.

My personal feeling is that Obama was willing to lead that movement, and Hillary was not.

Nothing that has happened since the election of `08 has deterred me from believing "they" were right. And, everything that Obama has done since then has shown "they" made the right choice.

Trying to persuade locked-out workers in Canada to accept a sharp cut in pay, Caterpillar Inc. is citing lower wages elsewhere. But instead of pointing to the usual models of cheap and pliant labor, such as China or Mexico, it is using a more surprising example: the U.S.

Wage and benefit costs at a Caterpillar rail-equipment plant in LaGrange, Ill., are less than half of those at the company's locomotive-assembly plant in London, Ontario, Caterpillar says. link

underestimated. Yes, the may seem to be little difference between those remaining in the Republican line-up, but Santorum will tap into not only the extremist Republican Evangelicals, but also, a number of Roman Catholics. Santorum will be the "Candidate of the Cardinals", bringing all of the current hierarchies dreams to pass--all their favorite sexual issues, both straight and gay, to the presidency while distancing themselves from the priest sexual scandals. While Santorum claims not to be an Opus Dei Catholic, he is a great supporter having lead a US delegation to the 100 birthday anniversary of the Opus Dei founder, Josemarie Escriva,

as I said in the other thread, pretty much now and certainly by the convention if he is the nominee, there will be no significant difference in the stated policies of Romney and Santorum. the difference being some people will hope Romney is faking and some will hope he is not.

not going to say that Santorum would have any coat tails that's for sure but if he could turn PA blue, Obama would probably lose the election because every scenario of him winning is dependent on PA being blue.

with or without Santorum. But he's not well liked there. So I don't see how putting him in the race would help the Republicans win it more than Romney. If anything I see the opposite happening because people don't have an opinion about Romney, while they have a bad opinion about Santorum.

as a matter fact I believe that as politicians go he IS smart and serious. particularly for a republican. he is able to construct a complete sentence. he has some rudimentary understanding of history. that equals smart and serious. or perhaps you forget that someone who could do neither was president for 8 years.

If a recount of Florida's disputed votes in last year's close presidential election had been allowed to proceed by the U.S. Supreme Court, Republican George W. Bush still would have won the White House, two newspapers reported Wednesday.

The Miami Herald and USA Today conducted a comprehensive review of 64,248 "undercounted" ballots in Florida's 67 counties that ended last month.

Their count showed that Bush's razor-thin margin of 537 votes -- certified in December by the Florida Secretary of State's office -- would have tripled to 1,655 votes if counted according to standards advocated by his Democratic rival, former Vice President Al Gore.

that would make this criminal junta's actions: violating the Constitution, turning any semblance of decency on its head, and making a mockery of fairness and non-partisanship, o.k?

Just like a dog scrapes dirt on the spot where he took a dump, this gang of Constitutional traitors even had the temerity to make their despicable decision a "one time only, not precedent setting," vote.

probably one of the two, or three, most shameless acts of any S.C. since our founding.

and win the oval office. It's not just child bearing women. It's any man who doesn't want to get his girlfriend knocked up.

When the attacks on planned parenthood were happening, facebook went up in flames. And it wasn't just the girls by a long shot. There are a lot of men out there who do not want kids, but do want to keep having sex.

According to a friend's (none / 0) (#198)
by MO Blue on Fri Jan 06, 2012 at 03:01:44 PM EST
very right wing brother, it is unamerican to elect a Mormon as president.

this is exactly right. this is what I am hearing. a lot. it is very deep seated. I really believe as I said yesterday they would actually prefer a Kenyan socialist. that may sound unbelievable but its true and MO blues comment is dead on.

they actually think that Obama is unamerican too and should not be president. I know people like this too. They are going to either not show up to vote or they are literally going to have to decide which is worse.

the establishment gets this. they do not actually know anyone who makes up the base. they are probably relying on polls in which unsurprisingly, at least to me, people did not tell the truth about their willingness to vote for a Morman and they dont get it.
but the thumpers meeting in TX this weekend, they get it.

but how many people won't admit to not voting for a black man? I bet there's a lot of people who won't do that but won't admit it either. You can probably google for a poll on how many people won't vote for a mormon. There was a good number that actually told the pollster that.

It might be impossible to poll a Romney/Obama matchup come to think of it with so many issues flying under the radar.

heres why. they do not actually believe the crap about Obama. they say it. but they dont actually believe it. I know this. I know them.

they believe that Romney pretty much equals the anti-christ. they BELIEVE it. they know Obama is actually a christian whatever they say. they remember Wright. they think Romney is an apostate from hell. I am not joking.

with some of these people. and what I found, admittedly anecdotal, is that they may not vote for Obama but the WILL not vote for Romney. some suggest a third party. there will be one or more. some say they may stay home. but one thing they are absolutely clear on is that they will not vote for a guy whos grandfather fled the country to escape anti polygamy laws and still share his cultish religion. I was really surprised how many time I heard that. I honestly didnt even know it and had to google it.

Does anyone think a probable mid-east wide firestorm of a war that would follow a US/Israeli attack on Iran would last only a month?

(Reuters) - Western powers this week readied a contingency plan to tap a record volume from emergency stockpiles to replace nearly all the Gulf oil that would be lost if Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz, industry sources and diplomats told Reuters.

They said senior executives of the International Energy Agency (IEA), which advises 28 oil consuming countries, discussed on Thursday an existing plan to release up to 14 million barrels per day (bpd) of government-owned oil stored in the United States, Europe, Japan and other importers.

Action on this scale would be more than five times the size of the biggest release in the agency's history -- made in response to Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

The maximum release, some 10 million bpd of crude and about 4 million bpd of refined products, could be sustained DURING THE FIRST MONTH of any coordinated action, the plan says.

they they are gone. he is IMO pretty much out of the equation. even if he does better than expected in NH, which seems very unlikely, he will die in SC and FL.
to bad for the repubs. idiots. he was their only chance against Obama.

that kind of thing shows how panicked the elites in DC are. If you've got Robert Reich suggesting such a thing I think it's pretty indicative of the panic that's going on. The problem with all this kind of thinking is that it's not dealing with the real problem: Obama. Trying to change out the VP or whatever is not going to do much. When push comes to shove though, they would rather lose and let the GOP have the presidency than do something about Obama it seems.

there's plenty of people talking about it. Yes, I think it's stupid. No, I don't think Obama is going to switch Biden out with Hillary but to me it shows a real lack of confidence in Obama which I can understand.

the economy is improving by the day. the republican party is in total meltdown and is fielding the most pathetic group of presidential candidates since the earth cooled and there have been a half dozen plausible electoral routes to victory laid out for Obama.
at what point do you let go of this absurd "every one in the white house is panicked and if he doesnt win PA he is doomed" BS? it has absolutely no basis in reality and you are smarter than that.
you really should make an effort to venture out of the echo chamber occasionally.

that's what they are projecting. Obama's numbers are not good and they are especially not good considering the state of the GOP right now. I never said everyone in the White House is in a state of panic. I said it's showing that the DC elites are in a state of panic if this is the kind of thing they are suggesting.

And if you noticed, all those "paths" are to get 270 EVs or just barely getting reelected. Maybe they are setting low standards or maybe it's purposeful misinformation.

Actually I get out of the echo chamber quite a bit and that's why I think that Obama's reelection is quite from the sure thing you seem to think it is.

getting reelected is what I have been saying for quite a while even if that happens. That's what the numbers are saying right now too. Barely getting reelected or barely losing the election. He's a drag on the party and Dems lose the senate.

also seems unlikely given the GOP's recent history of massive D vote suppression and brazen vote count manipulation. Unless our side does a better job of aggressively attacking the former and loudly warning about the latter, I'm afraid we're in for another repeat of 2000 or the more subtle 2004 theft.

Hope I'm wrong but I dont see O getting the kind of enthusiastic and impressive turnout he will need to overcome Slick Willard and the scheming GOP election theft apparatus.

think that if it is CLOSE I'm not talking like 10 pts but like 1 pt or less that the GOP isn't going to try something in FL? or OH? How is the governor's unpopularity going to make any voting difference if the Gov. gets all those absentee ballots loaded into the system like they have in the past?

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- One of the charms of the Iowa caucus is the event's intimate, homespun feel. But the downside of what amounts to an amateur production surfaced with reports calling into question Mitt Romney's astonishingly thin eight-vote victory.

Edward True, a poll watcher for Ron Paul, filed an affidavit Thursday saying that Romney's reported total overstated his support by 20 votes in Appanoose County, on the Missouri border. If true, and there were no further adjustments, Santorum would be the Iowa winner by 12 votes.